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ISSUE 02
WWW.ENTERPRISEITWORLD.COM
FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. M AY 2 0 2 2
RE-INVENTING
BUSINESS WITH APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
With a rapidly changing business environment, organizations have no option but to modernize applications to remain responsive and relevant.
P - 16
EDITOR’S LETTER Due to the shortage of chipsets and semiconductors, product availability on time is a big challenge. So, they are doing more with less. I think there are many IT leaders who are working 24/7 and 6 days a week. Even if they want to off load some responsibility to the team, the team is not ready to take the ownership of any project. Therefore, the CIOs are today seen to be performing everything. Although the team is there involved in decision making but actual decision is being taken by the CIOs and IT heads where there is no designation of CIOs. So, where the innovation would come from. It is a challenge of existence and challenge for survival. Management always keeps the IT leaders engaged in reporting and updating. There is a visible growth of frustration among the CIOs, CISOs and IT Heads. Therefore, many of the CIOs are preferring to relinquish their positions and joining hands with business side or starting their own business. Of course, it is not becoming a cake walk for them, but it is happening prematurely. So, the question comes here how to keep oneself motivated and keep the team also motivated to take responsibility. The answer is very difficult to find.
HOW TO KEEP ONE MOTIVATED AND PERFORMING
Hello Friends.
The biggest challenge for the new age CIOs or IT leaders or even the CISOs is to create the digital experience, which is based on AI and Automation. The IT leaders have so many stumbling blocks today that they are finding it very difficult to achieve and many times they withdraw themselves before the projects go live. There is huge pressure from all sides. From the management, there is a pressure to achieve the goal within the budget and timeline. There is pressure from the team to keep up with their growth and keeping them motivated. There is pressure to pick right solutions from the right OEM or vendor. We are now seeing a lot of IT leaders are taking to self - healing or self - motivating activities to keep themselves balanced. Some are either biking or hiking or doing some other things, which is really necessary for their self-growth. There is a huge challenge from the HR front, challenge from product availability front and challenge from ownership front. The industry is so competitive, the team gets broken within no time and IT leaders are on the receiving end.
NEXT MONTH SPECIAL
S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M
COVER STORY
SUPPLEMENT
INDUSTRY 4.0
QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS
The next issue is dedicated to the Industry 4.0. We would like to take feedback from the CIOs and OEMs and create our judgment on the same.
PLUS
Interviews and Case Studies
Catch interviews, guest articles and case studies of recent applications from the Industry stakeholders, IT/ITES Vendors and IT leaders and CIOs from the Enterprise IT World CIO Community.
The supplement story of the magazine would have relevant quotes from the top CIOs in India.
Send in your inputs to sanjay@accentinfomedia.com MAY 2022
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CONTENTS VOLUME 07
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ISSUE 02
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MAY 2022
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W W W. E N T E R P R I S E I T W O R L D . C O M 1
FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.
Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Chief Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra Managing Editor: Anisha Nayar Dhawan Sub Editor: Kumari Ambika Art Director: Shadab Khan Web Designer: Sangeet Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Senior Marketing Manager: Vaishali Shukla SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-41055458 E-mail: info@accentinfomedia.com
COVER STORY
EDITORIAL OFFICE
16 RE-INVENTING BUSINESS WITH APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
Delhi: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, New Delhi-110016, Phone: 91-11-41657670 / 46151993 info@ accentinfomedia.com
With a rapidly changing business environment, organizations have no option but to modernize applications to remain responsive and relevant.
INTERVIEW: /20 Goal is to Drive Great Customer Experience
Printed, Published and Owned by Sanjib Mohapatra Place of Publication: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016
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Printed at Karan Printers, F-29/2, 1st floor, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase-2, New Delhi 110020, India. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without the prior written permission from the publisher. Subscription: Rs.200 (12 issues) All payments favouring: Accent Info Media Pvt. Ltd.
Editorial~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 03 News~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 06
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22 GUEST TALK
Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 41055458
INTERVIEW
30 SECURITY
36 INTERVIEW
ABHISHEK AGARWAL
SAM CURRY
DANIEL HOFMANN
ABHAY SOLAPURKAR
“Introducing automation for business transformation”
“Paying a ransom demand does not guarantee a successful recovery, nor does it prevent another attack”
“Hornetsecurity Acquires Cybersecurity Training Experts, IT-Seal”
“Our goal is to simplify and economically democratize access to SSE solutions”
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
MAY 2022
ITWORLD
ROUND UP
Why web APIs have gained traction over the last decade
B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M
APIs are at the core of information technology trend. Whether it is mobile device, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, Big Data or social networks, everything relies on web-based interfaces to connect their distributed components and deliver innovative and disruptive solutions to every industry. There are three primary reasons why web APIs have gained traction over the last decade: Simplicity – Web APIs speaks a simple language: HTTP, the language of the web. This promotes easy integration from any programming language—no special libraries required. Lower Cost – Open source technologies have reduced the cost of building web APIs compared with the previous generation of technologies, which required expensive middleware and training to deliver them successfully. Higher Demand – From single-page applications (SPAs) to native and web-based mobile apps, the need 6
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for mobile accessibility and anytime, anywhere access has shifted the focus from HTML based delivery to the separation of data and capabilities from the presentation layer. APIs as Capabilities – The most important products in your organization are the business and technical capabilities your applications deliver. These capabilities, when combined into solutions, enable your customers, your partners, and your workforce to solve everyday problems and achieve their desired outcomes. With the emergence of messaging platforms, bots, and voice interfaces, things are dramatically changing. We are starting to see the focus shift from building applications to delivering capabilities via APIs that are then integrated into these platforms. Rather than users going to an application to get things done, we are now experiencing the shift to applications going to the user through these third-party platforms.
D ATA BRIEF
By 2024, Gartner estimates organizations will lower operational costs by 30 percent by combining advanced hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes. Source: Gartner
NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD
Pega Introduces New Capabilities to Help Speed Citizen Development Adoption While Maintaining Effective Governance
Pegasystems Inc. announced new Pega PlatformTM templates, training courses, and services to make it easier for citizen developers to create low-code applications faster and more effectively than ever before. By accelerating the adoption of low code across all types of business users, these tools can significantly reduce IT backlogs while limiting risk through effective governance. Current demand for professional developers exceeds talent availability, and it’s become nearly impossible for understaffed IT teams to balance coding new applications while tackling existing backlogs and maintaining legacy code. As a result, organizations are tapping citizen developers to get work done. According to Gartner, 41% of employees outside of IT already customize or build data or technology solutions. But citizen development can also create silos as well as increase risk and costs if performed without proper governance or by using platforms not sanctioned or supported
CIO
by enterprise IT. Pega’s low-code factory approach empowers citizen developers by combining a no-code development environment with technologysupported governance that automates the enforcement of best practices, while providing IT leaders the tools to foster innovation while ensuring security, scalability, and maintainability. To further support citizen development, Pega introduced the following new features, coursework, and services: ■ Application templates for simplified, intelligent workflows: Citizen developers need an environment to easily, quickly, and safely build applications. To accelerate time to value, Pega introduced new application templates for Pega App Factory that automate common business processes like information collection, requests and approvals management, personnel onboarding, and task management.
TeamViewer and SAP join forces to digitalize warehouse operations with Augmented Reality
TeamViewer announced the integration of its enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) platform, Frontline, with the SAP® Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) application. With TeamViewer Frontline Augmented Reality, an SAP endorsed app from TeamViewer and part of SAP’s industry cloud portfolio, customers can further enhance their logistics processes in SAP EWM and empower their workforce with AR-based vision picking that helps to increase productivity and create more efficient processes across their entire warehouse and logistics operations. Stefan Krauss, SVP, General Manager Discrete Industries and Energy & Natural Resources at SAP, said: “The effects from the recent disruptions in the global supply chain have been felt by almost everyone. Companies who have adapted the quickest have deployed agile warehouse management applications like SAP EWM, enabling them to rapidly adjust to external shocks and respond to demand, supply and workforce challenges quickly.
EVENTS
16-19 MAY, 2022
24-26 MAY, 2022
24-26 MAY, 2022
06-09 JUN, 2022
The three-day event is Alteryx’s flagship user conference where technology-powered data scientists, analytics innovators, major decision makers, visionary thinkers, and data experts alike come together to learn and share in a dynamic environment.
Microsoft typically uses its annual developers’ conference as a showcase for new products and technologies related to Windows and Azure. This year’s event will again be virtual.
Amplitudeâ€s in-person and online event focuses on product and growth and how leveraging product data can be critical to business success
Expert-led sessions, keynotes and seminars covering the latest cybersecurity developments.
Alteryx Inspire Americas 2022
Microsoft Build (Online)
LOCATION: DENVER, CO
LOCATION: VIRTUAL
RSA Conference
Amplify LOCATION: LAS VEGAS, NV
MAY 2022
LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO, CA
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NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD
Increase in demand for BPM services across sectors driving growth for One Point One Solutions
S/HE SAID IT
RON MCLNTYRE
CTO, DELMAR INTERNATIONAL
“I am evolving IT to focus on providing value and service to customers, whether they are external or internal customers.”
“We’re seeing AI is such a powerful technology, and we need to make sure it is equitable.” One Point One Solutions, company has signed 3 new and other marquee clients in the last two to three months and is in final stage discussion to add up more clients during the current quarter. One Point One is also witnessing a growing trend with their existing partners by about 15 to 20% purely due to market demand. The company has 5,500 seats on one shift basis, spread across its offices located in Mumbai, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Chennai and Indore. The current capacity utilisation stands at 3,500 seats, which is moving upwards 100% utilisation of current capacity on one shift basis by end of the current financial year. The company has enough room for expansion on a two shift basis to double the current capacity to 11,000 seats based on the demand scenario. Mr. Akshay Chhabra, Managing Director said, “The demand for BPM services is
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increasing as the economy opened up and every sector is focussing on winning new customers and making their existing customers experience delightful. We would be the biggest beneficiaries of the fastest growing Indian economy as the demand for our services is directly proportionate to growth in the service sector. Increasingly companies are focussing on their core business and outsourcing major process and other aspects to us. This is going to be the biggest driver for our growth. As our user Industries like Telecom & Broadcasting, Retail and E-commerce, Consumer Durables & FMCG, Banking and Finance, Travel & Hospitality and Insurance pick up buoyancy in their offerings and acquire more and more consumers, we are excited to lap this opportunity and grow in these exciting times.”
A S H L E Y VA N Z E E L A N D , V I C E P R E S I D E N T O F P R O D U CT I N T E G R AT I O N A N D C U S TO M E R C O L L A B O R AT I O N , I L LU M I N A
SECURITY
Eventus Launches ‘Ransomware Emergency Response Service’ at EUForce’22 “Eventus Techsol, successfully concluded their annual SKO event EUForce’22 recently in Mumbai. The theme for this year was Elevate & Accelerate. The event was attended by their global leadership from Singapore, the entire team across India and their key Principal partners – Trend Micro, Anlyz, and AccuKnox. The two-day event served as a forum for team building, planning, and reinforcing their determination to make cyber security as simple as possible for their valued customers, as well as discussions on cyber security issues.” MAY 2022
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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF
EOFY Checklist: Ensuring data resilience while managing rising costs
Western Digital Details Mission to Unlock the Potential of Data Western Digital Corp. detailed its mission to unlock the potential of data by harnessing the possibility to use it. In a series of keynotes delivered by company leaders, Western Digital also unveiled breakthrough HDD and Flash innovations inspired by the ways individuals and businesses use data to create what’s next. David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, commented on the rapidly expanding market that stems from modern computing. The growth of the cloud, the explosion of connected intelligent devices, and the everexpanding amount of digital information created with these devices each day around the world, all demand more and more storage capacity.
EXECUTIVE
David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, said, “Everything we do starts with the belief in human potential as it intersects digital innovation and in turn, creates possibility,” “Inspired by the many ways in which our customers use data and empowered by our strong go-to-market engine, we uniquely address the broad storage needs of our diverse customers, at any scale — from the smallest intelligent devices to the largest public clouds.” Rob Soderbery, EVP and GM of the Flash Business Unit at Western Digital, reinforced the company’s commitment to deliver the purposebuilt solutions that power the most important and exciting digital applications in the world today.
Businesses everywhere are under severe pressure from rising costs. EOFY is the perfect opportunity for Australian SMBs to rethink their operational expenditures and set the agenda for the new year ahead. It is also the time to consider the implications of the recent Federal Budget’s focus on cybersecurity and the Government’s technology investment boost to support digital adoption by small businesses. Here are some things to include in your EOFY checklist to address the need for greater cybersecurity resilience through protecting, storing and backing up data while managing costs: Keep your guard up – Rising costs aren’t your only problem. War is raging in Ukraine, and the threat of all-out cyberattacks increases daily. Bad actors will look for opportunities to exploit a challenging situation and attack you when you’re most vulnerable. Indeed, when you’re struggling economically, your cybersecurity risk is higher than ever—because that’s when attackers perceive you as easy prey. A proper backup and recovery plan lets you protect your data even if a cyberattack victimises you. Your business should look for an “immutable” data-storage solution that safeguards information continuously by taking snapshots every 90 seconds. Even if you fall victim to an attack, your data remains protected and can be easily recovered.
MOVEMENT
Ee Lyn Khoo Joins Avalara as Chief People Officer
Colliers India onboards Surabhi Gupta as Senior Director & Head of Office Services for North India
Ex-Microsoft Leader joins Darwinbox as SVP Engineering
SG Analytics welcomes Sid Banerjee as New CEO
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Chandra Rangan, Former Google Cloud Executive, Joins Neo4j Leadership Team
Sindhu Gangadharan, MD, SAP Labs India appointed to Siemens India’s Board of Directors
NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD
BOOK
SHELF
The Archer GLOBAL UPDATE
BY
PAULO COELHO’S
BCT Digital adds Compliance Management to its rt360-GRC product suite BCT Digital, has launched ‘rt360 Compliance Management’, which enables organizations to automate their compliance processes, helping them in achieving better compliance at a lower cost . By automating the overall process, it conducts continuous monitoring thereby proactively detecting any compliance violations to protect the company from considerable reputational damage and high financial penalties. It operates on five key elements. Firstly, it enables organizations to maintain a comprehensive library of regulations with regards to Compliance Management, wherein authorized users can add new regulation requirements such as external regulations or internal policies and map them at a process, department, or organization level. Secondly, it allows initiation of Compliance programs on a planned or on ad-hoc basis allowing to create and perform standardized compliance programs. It enables the company to foresee and prevent potential risks early and improve collaboration across verticals to provide critical real-time insights into compliance processes.
Further, the rt360 GRC solution comes up with a Compliance Register which serves as a centralized process repository for creating and managing internal policies and external regulations. Mapping of risk, controls, and other parameters for compliance can be performed through the application. It also helps in conducting periodic assessment and monitoring of organization’s compliance requirements to check the effectiveness of each control. The solution, further, offers reporting solution enabling persona-based reports and a comprehensive Compliance Dashboard to get data insights and monitor adherence. The application provides an integrated and holistic view of tracking compliance, risks and audits related to compliance through seamless integration with in-house systems and external third-party systems. Jaya Vaidhyanathan, CEO, BCT Digital said, “We are delighted to add a crucial Compliance Management solution to our rt360 GRC product suite, which reduces risk of compliance violations, penalties and reputational damage.
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RS. 200.00 (HARDCOVER) WHERE
AMAZON.IN
About The Book One of the most influential writers of our time, Paulo Coelho is the author of many international best sellers, including The Alchemist, Adultery and The Spy.
About the Author In The Archer we meet Tetsuya, a man once famous for his prodigious gift with a bow and arrow but who has since retired from public life, and the boy who comes searching for him. The boy has many questions, and in answering them Tetsuya illustrates the way of the bow and the tenets of a meaningful life.
Nagarro Q1 2022 statement: Nagarro continues its rapid growth Nagarro, presented its unaudited financial numbers for Q1 2022. Nagarro carried over its revenue momentum from Q4 2021 into Q1 2022. YoY revenue growth figures were especially impressive, aided by a year of strong hiring, three acquisitions, and a relatively slow Q1 last year. Demand continued to be strong and appeared unaffected by the looming possibility of a slowdown in the economy. Despite a difficult hiring environment, the company added a net 2,263 professionals in Q1 2022 – a number that includes additions through acquisitions, trainees, and lateral hires.
Revenue grew to €185.5 million in Q1 2022 from €115.7 million in Q1 2021, a growth of 60.3%. In constant currency, Q1 2022 YoY revenue growth was 55.2%. Gross profit grew in Q1 2022 to €50.4 million from €34.1 million in Q1 2021. Gross margin dropped, changing from 29.4% in Q1 2021 to 27.1% in Q1 2022. Adjusted EBITDA grew 56.1% from €18.6 million (16.0% of revenue) in Q1 2021 to €29.0 million (15.6% of revenue) in Q1 2022. EBITDA grew 60.9% YoY to €27.9 million, up from €17.3 million in Q1 2021. EBIT grew 73.8% YoY to €20.5 million, from €11.8 million in Q1
2021. Net profit increased by 81.6% YoY to €13.9 million against €7.7 million in Q1 2021. The cash balance reduced by €30.8 million from December 31, 2021, to €75.8 million at the end of the first quarter of 2022, primarily due to payment towards acquisition liabilities of €20.8 million. Bachar Kassar, co-founder and Managing Director, said, “Nagarro’s organizational design and culture and our engineering excellence continue to drive our strong growth. Right now, we may be one of the fastest growing IT services companies on the planet, and that is a great feeling.” MAY 2022
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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF
iHub-Data at IIIT Hyderabad launches Foundations of Modern Machine Learning Coures iHub-Data at IIIT Hyderabad invites applications from second-year undergraduate engineering students for its 50-week online course on Foundations of Modern Machine Learning commencing from August 2022. The program is specifically targeted at second-year undergraduate engineering students who are aiming at enhancing their knowledge and research capabilities to solve real-world problems using the latest tools and techniques of Machine Learning. Interactive online sessions will be delivered by IIITH faculty, which include amongst others, Prof CV Jawahar and Prof Anoop M Namboodiri. Around 40 standalone projects have been designed as part of hands-on tutorials. Mentors with considerable exposure to machine learning will help participants to realise objectives of tutorial projects. Industry experts will also contribute to the learning outcome through discussions and interactions. Prof CV Jawahar, said, “In order to equip students with abilities to solve problems that might arise in future, it is essential that they undergo such research oriented courses, which reinforce knowledge of fundamentals, and promote awareness about the latest tools and techniques.
Cyware Launches Industry’s First Automated ISACto-ISAC Operational Collaboration Initiative New automated sharing capability will benefit more than 10,000 organizations from major industry sectors with highly enriched, actionable, and contextual threat intelligence Cyware, the industry’s leading provider of the technology platform to build Cyber Fusion Centers for enterprises and threat intelligence sharing for ISACs and ISAOs, has expanded its technology offering to build the Industry’s first multi-sectoral operational collaboration network by enabling automated cross-sectoral threat intelligence sharing between information sharing communities (ISACs). Historically, threat intelligence sharing between industry sectors has been limited and never completed at this scale where sectors including healthcare, space, energy and natural gas, retail, manufacturing, operations technology, legal services, education, and maritime transportation have joined hands to share malware and vulnerability advisories as well as Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and threat mitigation strategies with each other in real-time.
SirionLabs Secures $85M to Accelerate Growth in the Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management Market SirionLabs announced a fresh round of $85 million in Series D funding led by Partners Group, acting on behalf of its clients, with participation from existing investors Avatar Capital, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global. This brings the total raised by SirionLabs to $157 million – a significant milestone for the company since it was founded in 2012 by entrepreneurs Ajay Agrawal, Kanti Prabha, Aditya Gupta and Claude Marais as it more than doubles the company’s capitalization. The investment will enable SirionLabs to continue expanding its leadership position in the rapidly growing enterprise CLM market, which is projected to reach $3.3 billion by 2027. 12 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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Ajay Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO of SirionLabs, said, “The two biggest challenges in CLM are aligning post-award performance with contract terms and automating the import of legacy documents using AI,” “The SirionOne platform has a compelling technology advantage in both of these areas. This capital allows us to seize the moment, accelerate product innovation and bring our award-winning solution to an increasing number of enterprise customers.” The funding from Partners Group will support scaling SirionLabs’ operations, which includes adding up to 200 employees to its global workforce.
DIGEST NETAPP TEAMS WITH NVIDIA TO ACCELERATE HPC AND AI WITH TURNKEY SUPERCOMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE NetApp® announced that NetApp EF600 all-flash NVMe storage combined with the BeeGFS parallel file system is now certified for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™. The new certification simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to enable faster implementation of these use cases. NetApp and NVIDIA have served hundreds of customers with a range of solutions, from building AI Centers of Excellence to solving massive-scale AI training challenges. DRUVA ENTERS INTO STRATEGIC AGREEMENT WITH AWS TO ENHANCE DATA RESILIENCY Druva Inc. announced a multi-year global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to accelerate customer migration and provide an added layer of cyber resiliency to the already secure AWS Cloud. Built on the existing relationship between Druva and AWS, this agreement underscores both companies’ commitment to delivering a cloud-native data protection solution on AWS, and supporting enterprises during critical phases of the cloud journey, including support for workload migration and deployments. As enterprises expand data footprints across hybrid and cloud environments, information technology (IT) infrastructure quickly becomes increasingly complex, costly, and resource intensive. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud on AWS has the ability to minimize these challenges for customers by simplifying solution deployment and management while delivering continuous innovation designed to help new customers realize value even faster. AVAYA ENTERS STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT TO DELIVER AVAYA ONECLOUD™ SOLUTIONS Avaya have expanded their global partnership by pairing the industry leading Avaya OneCloud™ portfolio with Microsoft Azure to provide organizations with more options to increase their productivity and customer engagement with unrivaled reliability, agility and scale. Building on the success of Avaya OneCloud™ Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure, Avaya is now expanding its partnership to include the Avaya OneCloud portfolio on Azure, for customers that want maximum flexibility to deploy in a hybrid, public or private cloud environment.
NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD
MANAGEMENT
MANTRA
“Conduct red team and bug bounty exercises to assess open source security.”
Zendesk Ushers in Era of Conversational CRM
Archana Rao, Global CIO, Atlassian
Over 80 Percent of Companies Rely on Stale Data for Decision-Making decision-making. According to the study, nearly 9 out of 10 companies report that they are unable to pull real-time insights from their legacy ERP systems to make smart business decisions.
While companies race to become data driven, a new global study shows organizations increasingly face challenges getting the right data in the right place for critical business decisions. According to the study, conducted by Dimensional Research for Fivetran, the global leader in modern data integration, the lack of real-time insights from ERP systems is a significant contributing factor. Traditional ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, such as SAP and Oracle databases, are widely used across the Fortune 500 to house critical operational data. While ubiquitous for enterprises today, very few companies are able to correctly leverage the data of these systems for
The study findings include: ■ 86 percent of respondents say their business needs access to real-time ERP data to make smart business decisions, yet only 23 percent of responding companies have systems in place to make that possible. ■ 82 percent of companies are making decisions based on stale information. ■ 85 percent state this stale data is leading to incorrect decisions and lost revenue. ■ 99 percent are struggling to gain consistent access to information stored in their ERP systems. ■ 65 percent of respondents say access to ERP data is difficult and 78 percent indicate software vendors intentionally make data access difficult. Those surveyed said poor access to ERP data directly impacts the business with slowed operations, bad decision-making and lost revenue. George Fraser, CEO at Fivetran, said, “If companies are going to truly be data driven, they cannot base decisions on only a fraction of the information or out-of-date business data.”
Zendesk unveiled new solutions that put conversations at the center of customer relationship management. Zendesk also announced today a new employee experience offering to help companies transform internal operations and create the best hybrid work experience. Mikkel Svane, CEO and founder, Zendesk, said, “The last few years have made it obvious that digital is the front door, convenience is paramount and relationships are anchored in conversations,” “Zendesk is helping businesses embrace this new generation of conversational customer relationship management and turn customer service into an engine for growth.” Better business with Conversational CRM Zendesk’s approach to Conversational CRM connects and integrates front and back offices to not only enable the front office to provide support, but also to provide a full range of intelligent, real-time data and services for customer engagement.
Kasten by Veeam Announces NEW Kasten K10 V5.0 with Enhanced Security Kasten by Veeam, the Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery platform, unveiled the new Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.0 Kubernetes data management platform. Purpose-built for Kubernetes, this latest release is focused on delivering a comprehensive risk management strategy, streamlined CI/CD pipelines and new ecosystem advancement details that optimize and de-risk Kubernetes investments. These advancements all aim to help the expanding Kubernetes community work more efficiently and securely in cloud native applications. “As ransomware attacks continue to remain the
highest concern for organizations, a comprehensive risk management strategy to help continuously identify risk, protect data, detect attacks and deliver disaster recovery for cloud native applications is crucial,” said Gaurav Rishi, Vice President of Products and Partnerships at Kasten by Veeam. “Our latest release remains focused on helping enterprises minimize the financial impact caused by attacks on data and cloud applications. At the same time, we’re also supporting developer needs for backup solutions that not only integrate with the CI/CD tools they use but pave the way for automation to detect and protect applications
as they get deployed.” Backing up Kubernetes applications while accommodating agile, shift-left development and distributed deployment environments remains a challenge for many organizations. Appliancebased approaches do not properly account for the unique characteristics of Kubernetes and replication doesn’t protect against infrastructure failures, data corruption, data loss or ransomware. Having a cloud native solution in place ensures secure and reliable backup without disrupting workflows or adding complexity that could inhibit innovation. MAY 2022
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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF
WIKA India Launches Mobile Calibration Van for Door-Step Service
Zoom to Acquire Solvvy and Advance the Next Frontier of Customer Service We’re excited to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Solvvy, launched Zoom Contact Center with the goal of redefining the contact center category with our unique combination of unified communications and customer experience – and we believe Solvvy will help us achieve that goal. As the nature of customer experience continues to fundamentally transform, enterprises increasingly need to deliver exceptional, personalized, and effortless customer experiences. That’s where Solvvy comes in – with the addition of Solvvy’s differentiated AI and machine learning technology, we’ll be able to accelerate our contact center roadmap to create a concierge-level experience for customers worldwide. As a result, we will help businesses of all sizes improve their customer retention, increase operating efficiency, and set new standards for customer service
and satisfaction. Solvvy’s proprietary technology will broaden Zoom Contact Center’s offering with scalable self-service and conversational AI. Our customers will benefit from an automated, integrated, and easy-to-deploy contact center, which will help answer end-customers’ questions and solve issues faster – improving the overall customer experience and driving operational savings. Together, we expect Zoom and Solvvy will offer elevated customer service experiences to a global enterprise base. We are confident that this combination will help advance the next frontier of customer service because Zoom and Solvvy are a terrific fit – both in terms of technology and culture. We have each built leading enterprise SaaS businesses through a focus on scalability, simplicity, and respect for the end-customer.
WIKA Instruments India, a wholly-owned subsidiary of WIKA Alexander Wiegand SE & Co. KG, Germany, has recently launched Mobile Calibration Van for maintenance and repair at the doorstep of clients. An initiative, born out of need to maintain equipment during COVID lockdown has been transformed into a valueadded service by WIKA India to provide services at the customer doorstep, delivering convenience for service. Mr Gaurav Bawa, Sr Vice President, WIKA India, said, “It has been always an endeavour of WIKA to offer the best products and services to the customers. As quality is the most important differentiator to lead the market, we decided to continue the best practice of reaching out to the consumer for service, rather than them shipping the goods to us. The initial foray in the service was borne out of necessity, when transportation was difficult during COVID lockdown. We plan to expand the service of mobile calibration van, based on positive feedback of the customers.” Mr.Bawa, said, “Maintaining equipment in industrial units is essential for effective production which reduces the risks. Every industry needs to maintain the calibration of types of equipment for accurate and reliable measurements. Delay in transportation is always an issue. Moreover, displacement may sometimes lead to further errors and damage to the equipments. Hence, keeping this in mind, the company has launched this service in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.”
Sophos Lifts the Lid Off Liquidity Mining CryptoCrime Sophos released threat research about nascent cybercrime in the article, “Liquidity Mining Scams Add Another Layer to Cryptocurrency Crime.” The article is the first in a series lifting the lid off scammers who are taking advantage of the hype about cryptocurrency trading and the vast sums of digital wealth users have made (and lost) in crypto markets to lure in and swindle would-be investors. In the investigative article, Sophos explains how the complexity of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi), the foundations of liquidity mining, create the ideal environment for criminals to easily camouflage and carry out 14 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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their malicious intentions. Scammers are not shy when it comes to targeting their victims; they proactively spam recipients via Direct Message on Twitter, What’s App, Telegram, and other social networking platforms, and innocuously chat about liquidity mining to put targets at ease. From there, scammers escalate the swindle. Above, a screen shot of an initial stage conversation from a scammer luring in a target. As spammy as this Direct Message seems, people are falling prey to what ensues: liquidity mining CryptoCrime. “Interactions from a single Direct Message on Twitter led to Sophos’ investigation that
uncovered several liquidity mining fraud rings. Liquidity mining is a form of cryptocurrencybased investment in DeFi that even when ‘legitimate’ is both dubious and complicated,” said Sean Gallagher, senior threat researcher at Sophos. “The strategies behind the investments themselves are complex, and there’s no regulation beyond the ‘smart contract’ code embedded in the DeFi network’s blockchain — code that many people can’t easily interpret even when it’s publicly published. There’s also a shortage of reliable information for new investors on how these networks work.
KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES // GUEST COLUMN
KEYSIGHT
DEMYSTIFYING INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION The whole idea of Intelligent Automation is to deliver efficiencies and free up resources. Gareth Smith, GM, Software Test Automation Keysight Technologies Inc. spoke in length about the whole subject.
and in a digital-first world, the need and demand will continue to grow. By 2024, Gartner estimates organizations will lower operational costs by 30 percent by combining advanced hyper-automation technologies with redesigned operational processes. One area that intelligent automation is transforming is software testing. Many organizations across the globe are utilizing Keysight Technologies’ platform to understand and meet customer demands. To learn more about intelligent automation, we asked Dr. Gareth Smith, Keysight’s General Manager of Software Test Automation, to share his thoughts. What is intelligent automation? Intelligent automation applies innovative technologies like AI, machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) to scale and streamline decision-making and processes to deliver operational efficiencies. The AI assists in the automation of processes to deliver better and faster results.
DR. GARETH SMITH GM, SOFTWARE TEST AUTOMATION, KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
“Dr. Gareth Smith leads Keysight’s software test automation group.
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
Previously Gareth was CTO at Eggplant – the pioneer in intelligent test automation, acquired by Keysight in June 2020. Gareth has a rich history of innovation in software, serving in leadership roles at Apama, Software AG and Progress Software.”
Organizations are increasingly embracing intelligent automation to deliver efficiencies and free up resources. These solutions are applied to various tasks across industries, with artificial intelligence (AI) providing vital brainpower. Automation aims to create processes that think, learn and adapt independently, and the technology replaces humans carrying out repetitive tasks with intelligent software robots. AI-assisted automation will deliver tangible business benefits,
How is intelligent automation transforming software testing? Intelligent automation uses technologies like AI to evaluate systems and auto-generate previously resource-intensive assets (such as scripts), analyze the results to predict bugs, and adjust the automation logic to improve test coverage and overall quality. This is a profound change from the testing environment of a couple of years ago. Then, software testing was perceived as a box-ticking activity to ensure that a product or system passed pre-defined and largely static tests. Manual testing provides the “intelligence” but is too slow for modern systems and isn’t comprehensive, making it obsolete – and there are more effective ways to use your workforce. Similarly,
legacy test automation didn’t incorporate intelligent technologies and relied on running the same script every time software was released. These approaches fail to spot new bugs, do not proactively find weak points in a system, and lack the brains to identify what is critical to test from a user’s perspective – which is why manual testing often went hand-in-hand with it. In a digitally dependent world, it’s no longer sufficient to rely only on verifying that a system meets the requirements. Instead, organizations must also be able to validate that their solutions meet users’ needs; it’s essential to understand and gauge the digital user experience. This requires continuously testing real user journeys across all touchpoints, browsers, devices, and systems. And the only way to do this is by integrating intelligent technologies that automate testing from the user perspective and garnering insights to optimize the experience. Intelligent automation is like unleashing an army of AIpowered bots onto applications, websites, and processes that behave like real users and explore (and experience) the workflows (or user journeys) as real users would. The automation needs to encompass more than functional testing and blend in performance and usability aspects. This accelerates the release of highquality software because you find meaningful problems and defects in those real-world flows. The result is a smarter, more costeffective way of continuously testing software and apps. What is the role of AI in intelligent automation? AI enables testing to move beyond simple rule-based automation.
To access the complete article log on to: www.enterpriseitworld.com
MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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COVER STORY // APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
RE-INVENTING
BUSINESS WITH
APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
With a rapidly changing business environment, organizations have no option but to modernize applications to remain responsive and relevant. BY AMBIKA@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
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APPLICATION MODERNIZATION // COVER STORY
A
pplication modernization initiatives witnessed rapid uptake to achieve business continuity during disruptions caused by Covid pandemic. Business embarked on digital delivery of services, re-designed internal systems and processes to offer new services and tweaked existing services to launch new business models, even as they worked towards enabling employees to work remotely in a secure manner. As things open up and businesses operate in a new normal of hybrid work environment, the role of new technologies such as Cloud, mobile, IoT, AI, automation are increasingly playing a role in business outcomes. But new technologies require an enabling environment to operate and
traditional IT environment is not conducive to support new initiatives. Organizations are fervently adopting modernization strategies to tap the information, data and assets trapped in siloed and legacy environments, and transport that into modern hyper-scaling environments offered by public Cloud. This is helping organizations to embark on gamechanging strategies that are built on a foundation of agile and responsive systems, where decision making based on informed insights and products and services are enhanced with continuous improvements. The external business environment is extremely dynamic and tech-savvy entrepreneurs are raising the game by disrupting the status quo with new business models leveraging Cloud, open-source
technologies and APIs. For example, Orix India, a leasing and transportation solutions provider has launched a new business model by offering cars on subscription in collaboration with automobile majors such as Maruti Suzuki and Tata Motors and retail leasing with Skoda, Volkswagon and Honda. But in the back end it required Orix to hook up with partners to facilitate customers to register, verify credentials and subscribe in a seamless manner—all of which was possible supported by open APIs and Cloud technologies. Modern applications boost innovation with frequent experimentation and fail-fast strategies. Experimentation has become a crucial ingredient of success and modern application architectures such as microservices, powered by containers
MAY 2022
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COVER STORY // APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
KAPIL MAHAJAN SAFEXPRESS CIO
“We built a modern ERP Cloud-native ERP system with a micro-services architecture, using Kubernetes to achieve agility and
GAURAV PANDEY CIO OF DELHIVERY
“Our challenges are typical to any growing organization with business requirements so dynamic that
IT landscape has to always be a step ahead to catch up with the changing business landscape, and so digitization is a business priority in Delhivery and the expectations from IT is huge.”
and serverless technologies, are equipped with high level of automation, built-in flexibility and scalability to empower businesses with agility. Putting in place a foundation for agile business has been crucial for survival. Says Gaurav Pandey, CIO of Delhivery, “Our challenges are typical to any growing organization with business requirements so dynamic that IT landscape has to always be a step ahead to catch up with the changing business landscape, and so digitization is a business priority in Delhivery and the expectations from IT is huge.” Digital is the foundation for New Business Environment Like Orix, most businesses are turning to a digital medium to facilitate customers. For instance, any retailer worth its name has a digital offering and Good Earth, a high end clothes and lifestyle goods providers with physical and online stores, leaned on its digital presence to get more bang for its bucks. During covid pandemic it achieved more than 100% growth in digital business by leveraging a combination of efforts that included
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stepping up online initiatives, tighter omnichannel integration and enhancing the mobile experience. As a design studio, the physical stores are critical to its strategy to deliver an exclusive customer experience to enable look and feel of products. But as the pandemic caused a steep downfall in customer footfall, digital became critical to ramp up sales by observing digital footprint and deliver a customized experience. A global survey by UNCTAD across 3,700 people in different countries, more than half of the respondents now shop online more frequently and rely on the internet more for news, healthrelated information and digital entertainment. The report emphasized that the acceleration of online shopping globally underscores the need for ensuring that all countries can seize the opportunities offered by digitalization as the world moves from pandemic response to recovery. Organizations such as Delhivery which form the backbone of the e-commerce business are on a rapid modernization initiative. “Key IT initiatives identified for the year 2022 include hybrid
innovate frequently. We need to customize offerings for large customers and need to make frequent changes designed exclusively for the customer. For example, the requirements to transport cars and vehicles is very different from transporting mobile phones.”
architecture, SIEM, DLP, wireless revamp and mobile Device Management.” Similarly Safexpress which caters primarily to the B2B segment, has been on steadily expanding its IT modernization initiative. Today it has a custom built, Cloud-native, ERP system hosted on AWS Cloud to cater to the exclusive requirements of its customer base. Speaking about the initiative, Safexpress CIO, Kapil Mahajan, says, “We built a modern ERP Cloud-native ERP system with a micro-services architecture, using Kubernetes to achieve agility and innovate frequently. We need to customize offerings for large customers and need to make frequent changes designed exclusively for the customer. For example, the requirements to transport cars and vehicles is very different from transporting mobile phones.” Safexpress delivers to as many as 31,187 pincodes and its fleet of 8000+ trucks travers more than 12,00,000 kms each day carrying a variety of goods from large cars for Tata Motors to small mobile handsets for Samsung. These are high value consignment goods with different sizes and
APPLICATION MODERNIZATION // COVER STORY
KAPIL MAHAJAN SAFEXPRESS CIO
“Technology is not just an enabler but a participant in increasing customer satisfaction. IOT GAURAV PANDEY CIO OF DELHIVERY
“With network spread across 400+ locations connecting length and breadth of India, IT is a key business enabler for the success of Delhivery.
enablement helps to track throughout transit by scanning the consignment barcode with digital scanners and providing updates to customer in a transparent manner.”
With rapid expansion in business, technical imperatives in Delhivery are very dynamic and closely aligned to the business imperatives.”
different handling requirements which come with very strict SLAs for time delivery and condition of consignment. Speed is of essence in the logistics industry and meeting and exceeding SLAs is a competitive edge—not surprising considering logistics is the backbone for many industries such as ecommerce, retail, manufacturing and FMCG. Therefore, Safexpress has a fanatical focus on meeting SLAs. The company embarked on digitization and IOT enablement to achieve operational efficiency and to meet with SLA. Says Mahajan, “Technology is not just an enabler but a participant in increasing customer satisfaction. IoT enablement enables to track the consignment throughout transit by scanning the consignment barcode with digital scanners and providing updates to customer in a transparent manner.” Achieving operational efficiency is a key driver for adopting digital and Delhivery’s Gaurav Pandey echoes in similar lines, “Being in the logistics business, mobile computing is an essential component of digitization in Delhivery.
Android mobile devices are used across various business functions in Delhivery and mobile apps are integral part of digitization.” Often application modernization is taken up as a technical project without considering business implications. But more businesses are becoming savvy and understand that only a data-driven strategy which provide insights into operations, security, cost, and usage and blends well with business objectives will help the business to reinvent and deliver transformational benefits. Gaurav Pandey, CIO of Delhivery sums it up well, “With network spread across 400+ locations connecting length and breadth of India, IT is a key business enabler for the success of Delhivery. With rapid expansion in business, technical imperatives in Delhivery are very dynamic and closely aligned to the business imperatives.” Application Modernization is not an option Businesses with legacy environment are realizing that old IT investments are delivering reduced returns as an increasing proportion of the IT budget are going into improving operations and
managing legacy systems than in value creation. One IDC estimate puts the figure of maintaining legacy systems at more than 78% of the IT budget with increasing difficulty in finding replacement hardware, software and people with skill sets to keep the old systems running. Many legacy applications are custom written in old programming languages which are not compatible with new technologies. It is difficult to maintain as there are hardly any skill sets available and any maintenance patches, updates and new releases require a downtime which is a liability in today’s always-on business environment. While digital transformation initiatives have been underway, disruptions caused by Covid-19 pandemic has brought in years of change in the way companies operate accelerating digitization. Embracing new technologies including application modernization is not just a business enabler but a differentiator and organizations must invest in smarter technologies to build new capabilities and lead with experimentation and innovation.
MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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Q&A // SMART COMMUNICATIONS
SMART COMMUNICATIONS
GOAL IS TO DRIVE GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE It is no secret that customer experience transformation is a very important piece in the digital transformation strategy for any organization. In the entire puzzle, customer communication is very important. Today, organizations are strongly pursuing the path of innovation to drive great customer experience. We spoke to James Brown, CEO, Smart Communications to understand his strategy. An excerpt.
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
What is the role of communication in the entire piece of Digital Transformation? Communications are really the backbone of a great customer experience. We believe at Smart Communications that what lies behind a great experience is a great conversation. So traditionally these perhaps would have been one-way communications between a bank or an insurance company and their customers but now what we’re seeing is those one-way communications are becoming two-way digital on demand and Omni channel conversations. They can be initiated by the customer they responded to by the institution. We genuinely look to establish a true conversation between the company and their consumers. So, it is a huge change in the way that companies interact with their customers. How communication has changed amid this pandemic? We have heard it many times that the pandemic has really driven digital transformation – really by necessity now. Communications that may have been static one way in the past have now become digital and on demand. They are very interactive. I think customers are comparing the experience they get with a bank or an insurer with the experience they may get from an online retailer. So, I think our customer experience has become the battleground for differentiation for brands. So, we have seen a huge adoption of our cloud based conversational communications. They are really trying to drive great customer experience.
We see ourselves unique. We really are evolving beyond communications into conversations. We have created a platform called Conversation Cloud. Conversation Cloud allows companies to collect information about their consumers through interactive two-way interview type forms of transformation to communicate in very robust personalized ways to collaborate on platform and to coordinate the entire conversation within our Conversation Cloud platform. So, we have got these key capabilities that we are building out within the platform. Interestingly, we have seen an enormous shift to cloud, and we are the only multi-tenant cloud platform in this category. We have been really at the forefront of driving these conversational communications in the cloud. So, it is a very exciting place to be in terms of our longer-term growth strategy. We are very focused on continuing our growth organically. We are focused on key regulated industries. So, industries like insurance, financial services and healthcare are most focussed categories. Globally, we recently made the acquisition of Swiss- based company called Assentis Technologies having expertise in customer communications management area. That has expanded our footprint and also given us a deeper financial services expertise as well. So, it’s a combination of really emphasizing the Conversation Cloud being very specific about the vertical industries that were focused on and expanding geographically as well. In fact, in Australia today we have a large installed-base, and it is just part of our wider Asia Pacific growth strategy.
What is the competitive advantage of Smart Communications? What is your strategy of growth?
What was the rationale behind acquiring Intelledox in Australia? Intelledox acquisitions was very important to us
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as it gave us capability to transform static formsbased processes into genuinely two-way interview like interactions, which is very personalized interactions with consumers. It allows companies to collect data about their consumers. So Intelledox acquisition gave us the great collect capability. We now call that SmartIQ. It sits alongside our SmartCOMM communications platform. It is a very powerful part of the conversation cloud. I think as we go forward, we will continue to look for innovative, exciting technologies that we think augment the conversation cloud and offer our customers a better way of building great customer experiences. What are the major challenges the CIOs are facing today from the communication standpoint? How do you try to mitigate these challenges? We are seeing a lot of companies are trying to remove the complexity. Many companies have got a lot of legacy platforms – some of it are homegrown and some are legacy platforms. We see a strong desire to simplify and have one enterprise platform managing the conversational communications. The other big dynamic we are seeing is that how you drive costs from the organization and move to a multi-tenant cloud platform – away from hosted applications within the on-premises environment. Surprisingly, moving to an enterprise platform like Smart Communications with our multi- tenant cloud architecture is a very strong attraction for the CIO that we are talking to. Government sector is also trying to modernise communication platform and is a big sector, how do you address this market? We have around 50 government agencies here in Australia. They use our smartIQ platform for a whole range of processes that involve interactions with citizens. I think the government space is a very interesting one. We have undergone our certification here in Australia so we can put our capabilities in the cloud for our government customers and alongside the core verticals that we’re focused on. We also see big opportunities in Telco and Utilities also. So, anywhere you see the industry is highly regulated and complex, we are seeing an opportunity of customer engagement and a real desire to have great conversations with the end consumer. Any geographic expansion that you are planning this year? We are certainly seeing the investments that we’ve made in in the mid Europe region. But with the acquisition of Intelledox in 2019. We can see very
SMART COMMUNICATIONS // Q&A
J A M E S
B R O W N
CEO, SMART COMMUNICATIONS
“Our multi- tenant cloud architecture is a very strong attraction for the CIO that we are talking to.” rapid expansion in the Asia Pacific region. North America has always been very important to us. Similarly, we can see a great traction in Canada as well. So, for a business like ours, which is very fast growing, we have got big ambitions in terms of expanding internationally. As a CEO, what is your vision for next 5 years?
We want to be absolutely at the forefront of driving great customer experience. We believe that our platform really is the conversational layer that sits around all the customer engagement and digital experience platforms that that companies are building. And we think that by building out these powerful and compliant conversational communication. We’ve got a very important role to play as we see industries around the world
continue to embrace the digital transformation. We have seen so much acceleration over the last couple of years that we want to do that by really focusing on successful customers and making sure that where we implement our platform, customers see really great success, and expand across their enterprise. So, we are really focused on very strong growth but at the same time making it profitable as well. MAY 2022
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GUEST COLUMN // JUDGE GROUP
JUDGE GROUP
INTRODUCING AUTOMATION FOR BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Automation is the biggest respite for the industries as far as bridging the gap of skill and errors by the human beings. In addition to this, automation bringing saving on the recuring cost on the human deployment, minimizes error and improves efficiency.
ABHISHEK AGARWAL
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
PRESIDENT – JUDGE INDIA & GLOBAL DELIVERY, THE JUDGE GROUP BRIEF PROFILE A dynamic leader with vast cross functional experience in Global Strategic & Tactical HR, Talent Acquisition, Recruitment, Sourcing, MIS/Analytics, Strategic Resource Management, Staffing, Business/ Functional Analysis & Operations Extensive International experience. Vast experience in leading large & virtual teams. Specialties: Business process, change management, consulting, continuous improvement, customer relations, data management, forecasting, functional, human resources, IT strategy, leadership, leadership training, market analysis, organizational skills, peoplesoft, performance management, policy analysis, recruiting, reports, requirements, sales, scheduling, software development, staffing, strategic, strategic planning. 22 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
MAY 2022
The argument that “machines will one day take over” is no longer valid as automation is already everywhere around us. Remote working and automation have made working more convenient, productive, and exciting for everyone. By 2025, 70 percent of the workforce will be working remotely at least five days per month, thanks to automation. According to the World Economic Forum, machines will complete 42 percent of total task hours in manufacturing and other services by the end of 2022. Many industries, small or big, have incorporated automation into all aspects of the business to save money, improve efficiencies, and encourage business growth. Today, each of us uses technology for personal and commercial use, and technology forms the backbone for many automationrelated processes. The potential unlocked with technology is insurmountable; with the right tools and the right application, business costs can be cut in half, companies can focus on scalability, and there can be room for innovations as automation driven by technology can do wonders. What is business automation? Business automation refers to the use of technological applications to automate routine operations, allowing staff to focus on higher-value duties. This covers AI-powered automation and business process automation. When one thinks of automation, it is sometimes misunderstood to imply intelligent robotics, yet it can be as simple as a set of tools contained within regular operating software applications. At its most basic level, automation entails putting in place a system that can do repetitive tasks and easily replicable operations without the use of human labor. Automation Applications
Automation is a wonderful approach to streamlining operations and boosting business growth, whether you manage a small firm or a major corporation. There are many applications of automation in industries that help companies perform effectively and efficiently. Cutting costs while maintaining long-term growth is another important reason automation has been given more credit. Unexpected global changes impacting different aspects of the business have made companies realize the importance of seamless and reliable processes. The applications of automation have provided credible results. For example, with marketing being one of the major automation domains, the majority of MSMEs use some type of automation while marketing, with “email marketing” being one of the most frequently used channels. As soon as a contact is added to the software, an introductory email can be generated and delivered. The software is set up to send a follow-up email a few days later, but only to people who opened the first email. When it comes to human resources, we have seen plenty of computer-automated software that can help with job application filing, interview scheduling, extending job offers, onboarding payroll processing, and compensation management, which are all tasks that human resource management systems may automate. These technologies can also provide insights into labor productivity via analytics. In the field of sales, automation solutions allow sales teams to spend less time tracking deal-related activity and more time making closing calls.
To access the complete article log on to: www.enterpriseitworld.com
ESDS // DATA CENTER
RUSHIKESH JADHAV CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, ESDS SOFTWARE SOLUTION LIMITED
“We at ESDS ensures conti nuous innovation in cloud computing.”
ESDS RECEIVES INDIA PATENT FOR VERTICAL AUTO-SCALING CLOUD TECHNOLOGY
ESDS
ESDS RECEIVES INDIA PATENT FOR VERTICAL AUTO-SCALING, CLOUD TECHNOLOGY
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
Alto India has very large IT organizations catering to the global requirement but when it comes to creating IP and patents, there are a few. ESDS Software Solution Limited has taken steps in the right direction and bringing laurels to the country by receiving patents for some ground breaking technologies. ESDS Software Solution Limited has been granted the patent for an invention entitled – Method and System for Real-Time Detection of Resource Requirement and Automatic Adjustments. The patent is granted for the novelty of ESDS’s approach toward Vertical Auto-scalability in Cloud Computing. The company received the India patent on 26th May 2022 for the term of 20 years from the 16th day of August 2011 following the provisions of the Patents Act, 1970 for this novelty. The inventors of this patent are Piyush Somani and Rushikesh Jadhav. Formerly, ESDS’s patent for eNlight cloud suite, which is an in-house devel-
oped vertically auto scalable cloud technology, was acquired from the USA (US9176788B2 in 2015), as well as the UK (GB2493812B in 2017). Traditionally horizontal scaling has been used by cloud service providers which had its limitations, especially the software license costs were duplicating every time the scaling happened. The approach proposed by ESDS is to introduce vertical auto-scaling in which the resources of a virtual machine in the cloud are adjusted in real-time. They are adjusted in response to the demand predicted by the machine learning algorithm based on historical resource data of that virtual machine. This removes the limitations
of horizontal scaling and saves a lot on licensing costs. “This’s a historical achievement for ESDS – an Indian Cloud Service Provider company that developed an indigenous Cloud for India. The patented technology is beneficial for traditional 3 tier and modern micro-services workloads, equally. It is my pleasure to thank our Government, our distinguished customers, our partners, and our dedicated teams at ESDS for trusting it. We at ESDS ensures continuous innovation in cloud computing” says Rushikesh Jadhav, Chief Technology Officer, ESDS Software Solution Limited.
MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 23
EXECUTIVE BRIEF
The Challenges of Network Security Management Examining the hurdles to managing risk, operations and resources Abstract
The rapid deployment of firewall and other security services across hyper-distributed networks, and the need for mobility in the “new normal” underscores the need for unified security management in companies of all sizes. This brief explores emerging trends, and examines network security challenges in the areas of risk management, security operations and resource allocation.
Introduction
Working-from-home, distributed networks, migration to the cloud, and a proliferation of apps and devices have resulted in an explosion of exposure points. Whether for a small business, distributed enterprise, or managed security service provider, the need to protect an ‘anytime, anywhere business’ is the new normal. At the same time, threats are increasingly evasive. With undetected threats increasing 145 percent year-overyear1, organizations can have no idea of what threats are being missed. Moreover, IT organizations face rising costs, shrinking budgets, and a tighter pool of qualified staff. Combined, these forces create significant network security challenges for IT to contain risk, manage operations and allocate resources.
Different Needs
All organizations need to understand and identify evolving threats. They all need insight into network activities, usage and
risk. They also all need to monitor, troubleshoot and resolve security and operational challenges. And they all must comply with strict internal security guidelines. Small businesses, however, can have limited in-house technical resources. Managing security and optimizing performance can be overwhelming. While larger enterprises and service providers may have in-house SecOps staff, they can face even broader and more challenging concerns. They may need to scale deployment and management of security across complex distributed networks. They have concerns about security automation and change management, audit reporting and policy continuity.
Risk management
Organizations today understand things can go from normal one day to complete chaos in just a matter of seconds. Risk of being victim to targeted attacks persist for many organizations as news of network breaches and massive data exposure continue making headlines. How do you know the extent to which your organization is at risk? Are there security gaps in your internal operations? What about your network users and the assets, websites and SaaS applications they use? And how do you decide to prioritize and address these risks? Application and data traffic traverses the internet, remote campuses, branch offices, and perhaps even third-party vendors. Organizations can have insufficient visibility and control over unsafe network activities, traffic irregularities, unusual data access and movement, unpatched firmware, security events and system health.
Risks that go unmanaged can start something worse. A breach will slow a company’s momentum and growth. Operations are disrupted as key personnel divert their focus away from key business priorities. Executives are compelled to put all their time towards damage control and public relations. The inability to recognize security risks inhibits security planning, policy decisions, and decisive actions.
Security operations
Firewalls themselves are also exposure points. Research from Gartner2 suggests that 99 percent of firewall breaches are caused by firewall misconfigurations. As firewall rules are created, copied and amended, they can work against one another causing unwanted security and performance consequences. Misconfigurations and conflicting rules can make the network vulnerable to sophisticated threats, unauthorized access or intrusion. Instead of tracking down security gaps and vulnerabilities, time might be better spent making sure that firewall configurations are not overly permissive and open backdoors to their infrastructures. Organizations need to validate and audit policies and configurations prior to rolling them out, and reverse them quickly if needed. The movement toward larger, more complex multi-cloud networks supporting more applications and users forms a new digital workplace. As networks grow, managing security operations, optimizing performance, solving operational issues and ensuring security measures and control access for users, devices and applications continue to be complex challenges. Organizations struggle to establish adequate internal security operations to comply with internal service level policies. These policies are designed protect businesses and their employees, reduce security risks, limit financial and legal liabilities. In managing disparate firewall devices individually and manually, organizations often experience inconsistent policies and procedures. There is often little to no analysis, testing, auditing and approval process in place to ensure the company is executing the right firewall rules, at the right time, and in conformance to internal compliance requirements.
1 2020 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report 2 Info Security
Resource allocation
A shortage of trained talent in the security industry has made staffing a serious concern. Many organizations, specifically SMBs, do not have adequate security talents and skill sets to proficiently maintain firewalls and solve serious security issues as they arise. Even a single firewall requires regular planned maintenance, daily monitoring, policy reviews and administrations, and firmware upgrades. As networks scale and grow across distributed enterprises and multi-tenant provider networks, the burden on security staff multiplies exponentially. Making matters worse, security operations staff can be burdened with managing and operating complex and fragmented firewall silos. Administrations are often complex, cumbersome and labor-intensive. Tasks and processes are generally unchecked, uncorroborated and non-compliant. This leads to a situation where small networks might accumulate dozens of firewall rules over many years while larger networks may have thousands.
Conclusion
A better way forward is needed. Smarter management tools are required for security teams to do their job effectively. SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM) gives you everything you need for comprehensive firewall management. It provides comprehensive visibility, granular control and capacity to govern the entire SonicWall network security operations with greater clarity, precision and speed. And it does it all from a single function-packed interface that can be accessed from any location using any web browser-enable device. Learn more. Contact your SonicWall representative, or visit www.sonicwall.com/nsm.
About SonicWall
SonicWall delivers Boundless Cybersecurity for the hyperdistributed era and a work reality where everyone is remote, mobile and unsecure. By knowing the unknown, providing real-time visibility and enabling breakthrough economics, SonicWall closes the cybersecurity business gap for enterprises, governments and SMBs worldwide. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com.
SonicWall, Inc. 1033 McCarthy Boulevard | Milpitas, CA 95035 Refer to our website for additional information. www.sonicwall.com © 2020 SonicWall Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
SonicWall is a trademark or registered trademark of SonicWall Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S.A. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. The information in this document is provided in connection with SonicWall Inc. and/or its affiliates’ products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property right is granted by this document or in connection with the sale of SonicWall products. EXCEPT AS SET FORTH IN THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS AS SPECIFIED IN THE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THIS PRODUCT, SONICWALL AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES ASSUME NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER AND DISCLAIMS ANY EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY RELATING TO ITS PRODUCTS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON- INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL SONICWALL AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE, SPECIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR LOSS OF INFORMATION) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THIS DOCUMENT, EVEN IF SONICWALL AND/OR ITS AFFILIATES HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. SonicWall and/or its affiliates make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this document and reserves the right to make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time without notice. SonicWall Inc. and/or its affiliates do not make any commitment to update the information contained in this document. ExecutiveBrief-TheChallengeOfNSM-US-VG-1965
Q&A // CYBEREASON
CYBEREASON
PAYING A RANSOM DEMAND DOES NOT GUARANTEE A SUCCESSFUL RECOVERY, NOR DOES IT PREVENT ANOTHER ATTACK Ransomware attacks have evolved from a cottage industry into a multi-billion dollar mega industry. With increasing sophistication behind RansomOps attacks, ransomware syndicates are reaping the benefits with record profits. Cybereason, technology provider for cyber security solutions, has published a new report, titled RansomOps: Inside Complex Ransomware Operations and the Ransomware Economy, which provides insights into the dynamics of the ransomware industry. EnterpriseIT spoke to the author of the report, Sam Curry, to get more insights into how the ransomware industry operates, who the attackers are, whether data can be recovered on paying ransom and how to strengthen the security posture.
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
When did the first ransomware attack take place. Can you share more about the first case and how did this all start? The first ransomware attack is believed to have occurred in the healthcare industry 30 years ago. Who is behind these attacks. Are these organized crime syndicates or random fly-by-night operators? Many of the ransomware groups are provided safe haven in countries such as Russia. Notorious groups include REvil, Conti Group, BlackMatter, CLOP and LockBit to name a handful. In 2021, the top ransomware gangs turned profits of more than $500 million dollars. Earlier this year, Cybereason discovered a switch from the ransomware groups being ‘state ignored’ meaning that the Russian government was aware of their activities and purposely ignored the illegal activity. As the Ukraine war broke out, the Russian government took control of many of the ransomware gangs and put them to work on behalf of their government. 26 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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Given that evading ransomware attackers is like a cat and mouse game, do you think attackers are more intelligent or how is it that they always seem to be one step ahead? If we have learned anything from the increase in global ransomware attacks, it is that the public and private sector need to invest now to ratchet up prevention and detection and improve resilience. We can meet fire with fire. Sure, the threat actors might get in, but we can slow them down. We can limit what they see. We can ensure fast detection and ejection. We can — in short — make material breaches a thing of the past. So, what if they get a toe hold on the ramparts. We can keep them out of the castle by planning and being smart ahead of time and setting up the right defenses. How have we created a world where there are new forms of threats and risks to life and safety? Companies may not believe they are in the crosshairs, but they all are. Every business should
regularly review business risk, including the impact cyberattacks could have on their business. Even if a company reviewed business risks, doing it again can throw up things that wasn’t obvious then. For all organizations, now’s the time to eliminate single points of failure, identify partners in your supply chain and contact them now and prepare for contingencies if their business becomes disrupted. In other words, have back-up suppliers ready on speed-dial if needed. There’s no silver bullet or magic potion that will solve the cybersecurity challenges facing most organizations. To minimize damage and to assess preparedness, organizations should identify the critical services that are “single points of failure” for the business. If critical services go down, the business stops. Have a plan for “what to do if.” This doesn’t have to be perfect, but think now about what has to be done if email goes away or a customer portal or CRM tool gets locked. There’s no perfect solution, but managers will be more creative when there isn’t adrenaline pumping. Know that any thought given to it on what the company will do is an advantage. Do companies recover all the information after paying ransom? There is honesty amongst some of the thieves carrying out ransomware attacks. Sometimes companies recover all of their data once a ransom is paid and in other instances they might receive data that is corrupted. In 2021, Colonial Pipeline was attacked by the DarkSide ransomware gang and paid a ransom of more than $4 million and the hackers handed over decryption keys that were corrupted and the company had to rely on the backup data systems in place to fully cover. Overall, it doesn’t pay to pay ransoms unless the organization consider the situation a matter or life or death. And in many countries, it is illegal to pay ransoms that fund terrorist or illicit activity. Is it a good strategy not to pay ransom and lose the data and information? One of the biggest issues organizations grapple with when subject to a ransomware attack is whether they should pay the ransom demand. According to findings from Cybereason’s global ransomware study of nearly 1,300 security professionals, from earlier this summer, in the UAE, 37% of surveyed companies reported that they had been hit by a ransomware attack in the last 24 months. A staggering 84% of these companies (24% higher than the global average) chose to pay the ransom but what is interesting is that of those, 90% suffered a second ransomware attack, often at the hands of the same threat actor group. The
CYBEREASON // Q&A
Organizations need cybersecurity with comprehensive visibility across the environment, and the ability to analyze indicators of behavior in addition to indicators of compromise. It’s important to view the entire malicious operation to understand the scope of the attack and to connect the dots between actions and behavior that may seem innocuous when viewed alone. Viewing the malicious operation gives a comprehensive understanding of what is going on, and gives you the visibility, context, and intelligence necessary to detect and prevent ransomware attacks before the damage is done. Did you speak with ransomware attackers for the report? Cybereason regularly tracks the movements and activities of dozens of threat groups around the world.
S A M
C U R R Y
CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, CYBEREASON
“If we have learned anything from the increase in global ransomware attacks, it is that the public and private sector need to invest now to ratchet up prevention and detection and improve resilience.”
research also divulged that of the organizations who opted to pay a ransom demand to regain access to their encrypted systems, 59% reported that some or all of the data was corrupted during the recovery process. As such our survey findings underscore why, with the exception of cases where there is a threat to life, it does not pay to pay ransomware attackers. Paying a ransom demand does not guarantee a successful recovery, does not prevent the attackers from hitting the victim organization again,
and in the end only exacerbates the problem by encouraging more attacks. What kind of strategies can companies adopt to prevent a ransomware attack? Traditional cybersecurity tools and next-gen endpoint solutions are inadequate in protecting against ransomware because they rely on recognizing previously identified attacks and indicators of compromise.
Can you comment on the psyche of victim organizations and speak from their perspective when they are attacked? Being victimized by a ransomware attack is a difficult situation for any organization to be in. Coupled with the fact that each infiltration, attack group, victim organization, jeopardized data set, and potentially impacted third-party is somewhat unique to every situation, many organizations feel like they have a bullseye on their backs. It doesn’t have to be this way for companies as there are many security products on the market that will help stop the ransomware threat. To disrupt cyber criminals’ operations and to ensure ransomware is stopped before it can have any negative impact, every endpoint within an organization needs to be protected by endpoint detection and remediation software. What must organizations/individuals do once they know there is an attack? There is too much focus on the ransomware executable, or how to recover once an organization’s servers and data are already encrypted. That’s like fighting terrorism by focusing only on the explosive device or waiting to hear the “boom” to know where to focus resources. Traditional cybersecurity tools and next-gen endpoint solutions are inadequate in protecting against ransomware because they rely on recognizing previously identified attacks and indicators of compromise. Organizations need cybersecurity with comprehensive visibility across the environment, and the ability to analyze indicators of behavior in addition to indicators of compromise.
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ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 27
Q&A // SIRIM BERHAD
SIRIM BERHAD
MOST CRITICAL IS TO HAVE RIGHT TALENT IN THE ORGANIZATIONS As we have entered the digital economy, every country is suffering from having the right technology and right talent. We spoke to Ts. Tengku Intan Narqiah Tengku Othman, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Group Digitalisation and Information Technology, Sirim Berhad, Malaysia, to understand her perspective. An Excerpt.
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
How do you see the post pandemic technology adoption In Malaysia? During the pandemic itself we could see that a lot of companies in Malaysia adopting technology in a fast-paced manner. It was an acceleration mode for many of the companies in Malaysia. So postponed, they would be continuing the momentum of having digitalization whereby they already saw the benefits of having accelerated it in the first place. So, the momentum will be going in a in a fast-paced mode. They will not stop it and, it is a matter of having the right resources and the right funding for them to continue further on enhance it. Right now, I believe they know exactly what is the most important thing that they need to enable in their organization for them to sustain and come to be pandemic free or crisis free in adopting the technology within Malaysia region. What has been the critical challenges of the CIO? The most critical challenge that Malaysia and many other regions have is to have the right talent as each organization has unique requirement. Some company required and E-commerce expert. Some companies need big data experts, and some other companies are still like to modernize their legacy systems and ERPs. So, the right talents being dispersed and being required by many organizations, we are in a race of finding the right talents. In the era of pandemic, we can engage talents from anywhere in the world. It is just a matter of having the right policy in place – especially in the government sector. Because how the government organization employs and engages the employees is totally different from the companies that have 28 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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an E-commerce business. They can use many freelancers and outsourced resources. But there is a strict requirement from the government owned organizations. We are never scarce of technologies as we have a lot of local players that bring in new technologies and new development. It is just that the right funding and right cost is needed. What is the ask from the management to the leaders like you in the government sector and how is it different to the private sector? Many private sectors have more freedom in terms of employing a lot of things to do a lot of creativity but in the government sector, there is bureaucracy and governance in place, which imposes restriction to do a lot of things freely. It is not that there is a lot of red tapism in the government sector for the sake of it but because there is a lot of historical aspects behind that. On the other hand, the governance or bureaucracy or process and policies are applied to a brick and mortar kind of a business not in the digital era. In the digital era, we need to use digital governance or compliance for us to move forward. So, there must be a balance in between the right amount of the governance or compliance and freedom of doing all the creativities in terms of new processes and new businesses. In the private sector, they have the competitive desire to be the best and to compete with the rest of their competitors. In the government sector, we are unique. We are not saying that we have monopoly in a lot of things, but we are serving the consumers and the public. So, it is totally a different kind of compliance or governance that we require. The consumers want a lot of transparency, and we
want to make sure that the taxpayers’ money is worth spending. They want to see that when we spend in terms of technology, it is being used by the consumer whereas in the private sector, their spend is on the customer centric activities. So, there is a two totally different kind of perspective, but at the end of the day, the consumers, the customer are humans. So, no matter how you do, you are serving a human being. Do you think skill is also a challenge in the government sector? Yes, but we have a lot of the government agency which support us in upskilling and reskilling but since we are an ageing population in Malaysia, it is a bit difficult to achieve this. There has to be excitement among the employees to get reskilled and upskilled. So, it is a challenge for us and countries like us in the region are also facing the same challenge. How technologies like cloud computing, RPA, AI, BI, etc. being utilized in minimizing human intervention? I believe last year Malaysia Government has already announced that they are opening five service providers to the public sector to adopt the cloud computing technology. And Sirim is one of the first government agencies to have adopted cloud computing. We found out that cloud computing gives us many advantages in terms of not utilizing a lot of CAPEX and enhancing productivity. Compared to the situation in the past, when we wanted to set up a server, we had to procure it, which would take a few months and it would take another few weeks to install it. Now with the cloud computing in place, it takes us only 15 minutes to provision, install and have the application up and running. So, in terms of business agility and competing with the rest of the world, it is now very beneficial. But we also need to be vigilant in terms of cyber security, privacy, data sovereignty, etc. Therefore, there are many players who have installed data center and cloud services within Malaysia. What about RPA adoption? In Sirim, we have not adopted RPA but we have adopted AI. RPA is more relevant to banking sector, and I know that many banks have adopted in Malaysia. But many of the companies are using manual process still owing to the cost advantage but in the future, I would assume that the RPA is going to have a lot of traction due to the factors of lack of talent and aging population. But I can see a lot of integration of chat bot is happening because of the customer center and artificial intelligence for prediction. RPA is a bit slow except the
SIRIM BERHAD // Q&A
“The hackers are not sleeping but we do sleep. That is where we work with partners as we are not expert on everything.’’
TS. TENGKU INTAN NARQIAH TENGKU OTHMAN CHIEF DIGITAL AND INFORMATION OFFICER, GROUP DIGITALISATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, SIRIM BERHAD, MALAYSIA
“In order the CIOs to move forward in the rest of the world, they need to showcase
the business outcome. They need to learn how to build a business.”
manufacturing. What is your strategy for Cyber Sector? The hackers are not sleeping but we do sleep. That is where we work with partners as we are not expert on everything. We protect one area they attack another area. It is like chicken and egg story. We continue manage and monitoring it and at the same time, balance what the business wants.
We also do not have the luxury of money and resources. We trust the partners to alert us and rest we take care, and we believe that partners are like brothers and sisters. How big is the challenge for a CIO or CISO to convince the management about new technologies and new budget allocation? When I start to talk to the board and top manage-
ment, I never talk about technology. I talk about the customer experience, benefit to the organization and ROI. I talk about the 2-3 times loss to the organization incase you do not have the right solution, which you can recover in one or two years. We calculate the loss based on the actual data. For example, if we introduce blockchain, we explain how we have the security and more revenue. We showcase the outcome on the basis of historical data. The CIOs in the past showcase technology marvel that they might have worked on, but I never showed the technology marvel, but I show the business model marvel. So, in order the CIOs to move forward in the rest of the world, they need to showcase the business outcome. They need to learn how to build a business. So, if you look at my portfolio I have been working as a businesswoman once upon a time. What is the piece of advice that you want to give to peer group in other regions? As you know women in technology is very rare but there is a rise of women in technology now. So, my advice to other women in the technology is: “be yourself ”. The CIO world needs a diversity. Number two is that technology becomes obsolete in one to two years. So, learn about business centric model. Learn about calculating the right ROI and learn about leadership because talent stays because of your leadership and your vision of technology implementation in your organization. MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 29
SECURITY // HORNETSECURITY
DANIEL HOFMANN CEO HORNETSECURITY
“Hornetsecurity’s strategic acquisitions serve to enhance and extend the company’s position as a leading provider of security, data loss prevention and compliance solutions, with a particular focus on the Microsoft 365 environment.”
HORNETSECURITY
HORNETSECURITY ACQUIRES CYBERSECURITY TRAINING EXPERTS, IT-SEAL
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
Hornetsecurity adds IT security awareness-building training to its portfolio. Hornetsecurity, announced the acquisition of ITSeal, a security awareness training company. This is the latest in a spate of growth-boosting acquisitions by Hornetsecurity since 2019, where the company purchased Spamina, the Spanish market leader for cloud email security solutions; followed by its British market Partner EveryCloud, in 2020; Altaro, a global provider of backup solutions and Zerospam, a Canadian email security leader, both in 2021. Backed by Verdane, the specialist Northern European growth equity investor, and PSG Equity, a growth equity firm partnering with software and technology-enabled services 30 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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companies to help accelerate their growth, the company grew to 400 employees and a strong international network of 5,000+ channel partners in recent years. Helping companies establish a sustainable security culture Located in Darmstadt, Germany, IT-Seal specialises in establishing a sustainable security culture. It employs innovative technologies to train employees at businesses and organizations worldwide. The company uses a scientific, patented security awareness indicator (Employee
Security Index – ESI®) to make security awareness measurable and comparable. IT-Seals activities stem from the position that every person makes an important contribution to everyone’s IT security. As a result, the company focuses on the human factor, with the vision to help secure both the digital society and the economy. The three co-founders, David Kelm, Alex Wyllie and Yannic Ambach, will remain on board and continue to develop the product and its range of services. Boosting the cybersecurity awarenessprevention-detection cycle Daniel Hofmann, CEO of Hornetsecurity, explained that each of Hornetsecurity’s strategic acquisitions serve to enhance and extend the company’s position as a leading provider of security, data loss prevention and compliance solutions, with a particular focus on the Microsoft 365 environment. Daniel Hofmann, CEO of Hornetsecurity, said, “We believe IT-Seal is a perfect addition to our portfolio. We always stress the importance of cybersecurity awareness to our partners and customers, and we provide this via informative and educational blog posts, ebooks, webinars and reports. With IT-Seal on board, we will now provide IT security training as part of our package. This enables us to cover all aspects of the awareness-prevention-detection cycle, alongside our established email security and backup and recovery solutions.”
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FORESCOUT TECHNOLOGIES // SECURITY
SHAWN TAYLOR VICE PRESIDENT, THREAT DEFENSE FORESCOUT TECHNOLOGIES
“Forescout is launching this new service to help organizations defend against attacks by providing a complete and holistic view of their assets.”
FORESCOUT
FORESCOUT LAUNCHES FORESCOUT FRONTLINE TO HELP ORGANIZATIONS TACKLE, RANSOMWARE AND REAL-TIME THREATS
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
New threat hunting and risk identification service provides organizations with an enterprise-wide baseline of their threat landscape and risk exposure. Forescout Technologies, announced the launch of Forescout Frontline, a new threat hunting service utilizing a team of highly-trained cybersecurity analysts to support cybersecurity teams by proactively identifying risks, enabling accelerated incident response, and maturing security posture. Forescout is offering this complimentary service for organizations that lack the internal resources and visibility to defend themselves from
cybersecurity attacks, including ransomware and advanced persistent threats (APT). Shawn Taylor, vice president of threat defense, said, “Cybersecurity attacks are on the rise. Simultaneously, cybersecurity teams are perennially understaffed and under-resourced. This has created a perfect storm,” “Organizations are under immense pressure to cope with the scale and speed of attacks and the havoc caused
by the adversaries. Forescout is launching this new service to help organizations defend against attacks by providing a complete and holistic view of their assets.” Many organizations use multiple security tools across multiple teams to help identify threats and risks. However, insights may be limited due to siloed views of IT, IoT, IoMT or OT assets. Typically, a variety of these asset types exist across an organization’s digital terrain and are often interconnected, which means cybersecurity risk must be identified and tackled holistically. A State of Florida Agency, which supports several key Florida departments, engaged Forescout Frontline to understand each instance of Log4j, a zero-day vulnerability in a popular Java logging framework, across the organization’s 220 sites in 16 diverse divisions. In less than a day and a half, Forescout Frontline delivered insights into thousands of assets with vulnerabilities such as Log4j and Windows-based PrintNightmare. Additionally, hundreds of Critical CVSS-rated vulnerabilities affecting infrastructure devices such as switches and routers were found. Finally, actionable intelligence concerning critical embedded IoT TCP-IP stack-based instances such as NUCLEUS: 13 and RIPPLE 20, insecure communications, and other risks were also discovered. Leveraging this free service shrunk the time to mitigation and remediation of these security gaps and improved overall security posture. “When Log4J broke, we knew it was a critical issue, but we lacked a full picture of the risk within our extended enterprise. The [Forescout threat hunting] report was way more thorough than I expected, with in-depth information and actionable intelligence. Not just on Log4j but on other critical vulnerabilities as well, and not just in general terms but exactly where they exist in our environment.” MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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Q&A // O4S
O4S
UNIQUE IOT BASED SOLUTIONS CAN CONTROL PRODUCT MOVEMENT WITHIN THE SUPPLY CHAIN INDUSTRY O4S plans to launch a predictive analysis and forecasting module by 1st quarter of 2022.
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
How has Supply Chain tech at O4S changed post-pandemic? Our fundamentals remain the same. But we have changed our business model from transactionbased to license-based services. We have further upgraded our Tech stack, in terms of features. We are investing deeply in developing strong capabilities to provide AI and Machine Learning to its clients to help them make the most of their data. Critically we are providing prescriptive insights into their supply chain. We are expanding our product offering to include a comprehensive warehouse management system, a bidirectional order management system that connects to ERP systems via an API ecosystem, and a trade promotions optimization feature, which will be bolstered by an integrated trade margin and disbursements system. O4S offers a wide range of services & solutions. What are your major areas of expertise? O4S solutions are relevant to any industry comprising a supply chain. Through our solutions, we aim to solve the persistent problem arising due to negligible visibility in supply chain operations. Our product modules MARK, Supplytics, Gynger, and Original4Sure help businesses get data and make predictions for probable problems and outcomes, which can help in making critical and informed decisions about the business and its operations. With the help of MARK, we assign Unique Identities (UIDs) embedded within a QR code to every manufactured product within the facilities using O4S’ proprietary IoT technology. Through 32 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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these UIDs, companies can track product movement across the supply chain. Supplytics help organizations take critical business decisions by efficiently monitoring physical inventory position, stock movement, stock ageing, product returns, and dispatches. The solution achieves this by seamlessly capturing each movement of the product until it reaches retailers using android handheld devices that are capable of performing fast scans. Gynger helps brands directly connect with Retailers and Influencers to drive incremental sales and improve trade promotion effectiveness by using real-time insights. The entire reward gain and redemption process is performed by eliminating reliance on Distributors. Using Original4Sure, we offer consumers a way to verify the authenticity of their purchases by scanning the QR code via their mobile phones. Besides, it helps brands in recognizing prominent consumption patterns across geographies using advanced analytics. What is leadership according to you? I believe true leadership is applying a lens of people-centricity to the key components of an organization. By letting people be our guide, culture will thrive, innovation will flourish and employees are empowered to create real change. In other words, we aim at fostering a culture where people will truly value it. It involves asking employees for their unique insights and perspectives. Organisations should promote good leadership within the company to sustain themselves in the long run.
How would you define the growth in the FMCG, pharmaceutical, and Agri sectors pre and post-pandemic? Before the pandemic, the majority of companies across various industries were reluctant to adopt digitization. Some were still running manual checks and systems. The pandemic lockdowns affected companies in many ways like disruptions in the supply chain, visibility became blurred, production was halted, inventory management went for a toss, and more holes emerged in the existing supply chain systems. Lessons were learnt and post-Covid, organizations are identifying leakages in their operations and working on filling these gaps using mainly technology. Because technology is the solution to a fast and seamless supply chain, especially if an organization wishes to stay in the competition. Companies are now consciously identifying blind spots across operations to incorporate flexible and sustainable initiatives and make them an integral piece of their business model. Manufacturers are now taking into consideration the importance of visibility across distribution channels, and databacked information pertaining to where, how, and to whom goods are being sold. This is helping in connecting various nodes of the supply chain, enabling all the stakeholders and manufacturers to closely monitor their distribution chains. How are you leveraging technologies to create a data-driven supply chain in the Indian market? O4S’s unique IoT-based multi-module solutions help organizations gain control over product movement across the supply chain from the time they leave the manufacturing facility till they reach the end consumer. The company’s solutions are deployed on the cloud and easily integrated with the existing infrastructure thereby eliminating the requirement of any further capital expenditure. O4S state-of-the-art solutions revolve around the concept of Serialization which assigns unique digital identities to every unit being manufactured, enabling the organizations to track and trace each product. Moreover, the company’s advanced inventory management analytics solutions help organizations take critical business decisions by monitoring physical inventory position, stock movement, ageing, and more critical KPIs. How has been your journey since the company’s inception? O4S started as a brand protection startup in 2017 and within a few years, evolved to become a SaaS solution provider. We started addressing various pain points experienced at every node of the
O4S // Q&A
Service (SaaS) Platform while ensuring the lowest investment of money and time, and a high return on investment. What are the major growth drivers for the logistics sector? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics are going to be the future. AI allows for more integration and visibility across networks of stakeholders that were previously remote or disparate. IoT is already playing a significant role in the supply chain, but it will likely continue to grow in importance with increasingly diverse applications. IoT is also being used to improve warehouse management, fleet tracking, inventory control, and even technological and mechanical maintenance. Trends show that there will soon be entirely smart warehouses and fleets, and IoT spending is set to be focused on transportation, logistics, and discrete costs. Alongside this, cloud computing and smaller sensors have allowed more devices to be quickly and easily interconnected. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR) are also increasingly being adopted in several capacities.
D I VAY
K U M A R
CO-FOUNDER & CEO, O4S
“O4S is on a mission to disrupt and democratize the use of advanced tech by integrating the Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform while ensuring the lowest investment of money and time, and a high return on investment.”
supply chain, be it production traceability, FIFO compilation, Retailer & technician loyalty management, e-warranty, and consumer engagement. O4S was incepted with a vision to integrate advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) for practical applications in Supply Chain Management. The manufacturing industry has a fairly complex supply chain with millions of products moving through vari-
ous nodes and parties every single day. Moreover, the industry experiences a high dependency on manual operations. Thus, making Automation, Digitization, and Transparency in the Supply Chain, the need for the hour to optimize and bring high levels of efficiency. So far, these initiatives have required significant change management and capital investments. O4S is on a mission to disrupt and democratize the use of advanced tech by integrating the Software as a
At this pace of growth, what is your vision 5-10 years down the line for the organization? By the end of the first quarter of the calendar year 2022, O4S plans to launch a particular module for predictive analytics and forecasting. Apart from this, it would increase its headcount to above 200. At present, the company has over 100 members, including 60-65 in technology, six in sales, and 20-25 in the operations team. With the product-market fit established, we’re aggressively looking to expand across new geographies such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand, among others. These countries hold tremendous potential for digitized and automated products. Further, we’re also looking to incorporate an office in the USA to partner with companies for compliance traceability across North and South America. By 2023, we will be focusing on expanding a lot into Europe. We know by the response for our products that more than 200 customers in the next 18 months will come from outside India. The government has also announced a plan of making mega ports by 2030, so we will also be looking at container manufacturing, which is an allied sector. What has been the biggest challenge for you this year? Post-pandemic our goal was to increase the company growth by three folds, which we have already accomplished. Our target this year is to expand the size of the company by double and the current client portfolio from 50 to 200 clients. MAY 2022
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DIGITIZATION // DATASIGNS TECHNOLOGIES
DIGITIZATION
M
yShubhLife, strengthens its financial support ecosystem by adding new services to its Corporate Wellness Programme ‘Shubh Saathi’ for employees of its partner firms, those falling into the income bracket of Rs. 1.5 lacs to Rs. 4 lacs per annum. Under their program, MyShubhLife has extended the already existing services to the likes of insurance, loans, facilitating preparation of a credit score, mutual fund SIPs, e-gold, e-tax filing and bill payments. MyShubhLife with its flagship gold membership program ‘Shubh Saathi’ has not only eliminated process friction but also credit fiction, which is one of the many grounding problems existing in financial service institutions. This was made possible with the help of the android app that provides all facilities including interaction through six different languages such as Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi and English. The recent addition of Integrated Bill Payment is an ode to the further development of existing financial services for the next half billion. Founder & CEO, Monish Anand, added, “Our goal, to create financial wellness for the next half billion aligns with that of human resource managers and business leaders – to create wellness programs for their blue / gray collared employees. Shubh Saathi, is a curated Employee Wellness Program for employees of our partner companies with an easy way to implement using simple tech integration. We offer 100% product customization based on feedback from HR managers and listening to our customers from over 600+ partner companies” “Our customers require credit for expenses arising from various non-discretionary reasons. As people living in a world of means; we all have the same needs. The people with access to formal credit are in search of convenience whereas our customers are in search of formal credit. As no product is ‘one size fits all’; Shubh Saathi offers Small ticket loans (Chota Loan), Big ticket Personal Loans, Earned Wage Access, sachet size insurance, affordable investment options of SIPs and E Gold (from as low as Rs.100), easy bill payments, E filing taxes, etc. specially designed to address the growing need for access to affordable financial products. Showing no digital divide, MyShubhLife follows the philosophy of Touch &
34 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
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MYSHUBHLIFE STRENGTHENS ITS CORPORATE WELLNESS PROGRAMME ‘SHUBH SAATHI’ MyShubhLife’s partners can build an effective financial wellness programme digitally, using a good mix of products and help create a sense of financial freedom in their employees to help live up to their full potential.
MONISH ANAND FOUNDER & CEO - MYSHUBHLIFE DATASIGNS TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD.
“Our goal, to create financial wellness for the next half billion aligns with that of human resource managers and business leaders
– to create wellness programs for their blue / gray collared employees.”
Tech. Today, getting access to good schools, timely medical care, ability to pay rent, etc has become more and more possible for the workforce due to Shubh Saathi.” he further adds. MyShubhLife’s partners can build an effective
financial wellness programme digitally, using a good mix of products and help create a sense of financial freedom in their employees to help live up to their full potential.
TATA COMMUNICATIONS // DIGITIZATION
DIGITIZATION
T
o transform customer engagement with intelligent Human to Everything (H2X) interactions across all customer experience (CX) platforms of digital-first businesses Tata Communications launches DIGO, an in-network, cloud communications platform to power up customer engagement for digital-first businesses. The platform offers a full suite of device-agnostic communications tools to seamlessly integrate into an enterprise’s current applications, enabling it to bring intelligent, 360-degree human-toeverything (H2X) interactions for its users. DIGO powered by Tata Communications seamlessly enables customised workflows by integrating and connecting fragmented communications channels, Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms, and connectors (SaaS and IoT) in a platform that is designed to be infinitely scalable. This dramatically reduces the complexity of bringing solutions to the market, while focusing on providing the ultimate end user experiences. This newly launched DIGO powered by Tata Communications offers businesses an extensive range of cutting-edge customer engagement tools delivered on the most connected network coverage. These include a customer engagement platform integrated with programmable building blocks including voice, SMS, email, social messaging, video, text to speech, IVR, chatbot and analytics tools amongst others. The platform will also augment existing applications of enterprises with an extensive connectors’ library. This complete solution is wrapped with enterprisegrade personalised services, ensuring businesses get scalable, interoperable, secure and regulatory compliant customer engagement outcomes. “DIGO will open a New World of Communications™ for businesses. It is designed to offer omnichannel, fast and intuitive user-experiences in a rapidly evolving digital-first world which demands agility, acceleration and hyperconnectivity,” said Mysore Madhusudhan, Executive Vice President, Collaboration and Connected Solutions, Tata Communications. “We have already received a tremendous response from enterprises across on-demand platforms, automotive, BFSI, healthcare sectors to name a few. We are excited to empower CX journeys of businesses with intelligent and enhanced user interactions.
TATA COMMUNICATIONS LAUNCHES IDIGO – INTEGRATED PLATFORM FOR CONVERGED AND CONTEXTUAL CONVERSATIONS Customer Experience Transformation or CX is the biggest goal for today’s enterprises. There has been a lot of individual excellence by the enterprises to create customer experience transformation. Tata Communications DIGO is a great step forward.
MYSORE MADHUSUDHAN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, COLLABORATION AND CONNECTED SOLUTIONS, TATA COMMUNICATIONS
“DIGO will open a New World of Commu nications™ for businesses. It is designed to offer omnichannel, fast and intuitive userexperiences in a rapidly evolving digital-first world which demands agility, acceleration and hyperconnectivity.”
MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 35
Q&A // SKYHIGH SECURITY
under the banner of SSE.
SKYHIGH SECURITY
OUR GOAL IS TO SIMPLIFY AND ECONOMICALLY DEMOCRATIZE ACCESS TO SSE SOLUTIONS
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
In a recent interaction, the CCO of Skyhigh Security, Abhay Solapurkar highlights the market needs that the company is addressing in India, future plans, their products, and much more. What specific market need(s) is Skyhigh security addressing considering the cloud security market is teeming with players across sizes? Two things influence how the cloud security market interacts with clients today. The first is about enterprises’ digital transformation as they adopt more cloud services and shift more of their apps to the cloud, and the second is about what has unfolded in recent years with the remote workforce. This is especially true in India, due to the country’s enormous IT sector. In this setting, the basic security model that has worked for decades fails. Previously, it was completely localised, with all personnel in a workplace building and all data in their data centre, which could be surrounded by a high level of protection. Because data is now everywhere, a new sort of security technique is required. Your security must be in the cloud as well, and so this is a relatively new transformation in the security industry. Skyhigh Security focuses particularly on the Security Service Edge (SSE) market within cloud security. We have developed a completely different approach to cloud security. Concentrate on the data if you want to secure it. So, the policy, the enforcement, everything revolves around the data, regardless of where the data resides. This is known as our data-aware approach. When these security capabilities existed on-premises, you could stack several vendors and have all traffic go through this extremely sophisticated vendor and technology stack in the cloud area. That’s prohibitive because there’s a significant penalty for steering your traffic from one vendor cloud to another, and you’d prefer it to only steer it to one 36 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
MAY 2022
cloud. Even though Skyhigh Security is a new company, we have strong technical roots. We have a wide range of technology that is over a decade old, and we have been a leader in this cloud journey since before the cloud market ever existed. Many of our products were among the first to hit the market as part of the McAfee Enterprise product range, which also included a large development centre in Bengaluru. How does SSE differ from Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)? Gartner coined the term SASE to describe an architecture that combines software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) with a portfolio of cloud-based security tools – including SWG, CASB, and ZTNA. The goal of SASE is to shift from traditional perimeter protections to identity-based controls that securely connect people with data and applications from any device and location, even when they aren’t on the VPN. For large enterprises, transitioning to a full SASE system is a lengthy process. Gartner also introduced Security Service Edge (SSE) in early 2021 as a single-vendor, cloud-centric converged solution that accelerates digital transformation by securing enterprise access to the web, cloud services, Software-as-a-Service, and private applications. It is regarded as a critical component in constructing cloud and networking security capable of supporting increased performance and expansion. Recognizing that all-or-nothing approaches are impractical at a time of urgency, Gartner proposed splitting the security and SD-WAN components and unifying the former
How did the pandemic change you as a leader? Pandemic has become a game-changer overnight, and some of the generational industry norms have been altered forever. Today, you don’t need your teams to be in the office to provide all kinds of services, and the standard operating norm has become remote/hybrid. The companies will have to adapt and embrace the new beginning. As a leader, one has to focus a lot more on the health, and well-being of the employee and their family. Mental and emotional issues have caused an impact, and as a leader, one needs to lead with a lot more empathy and a high degree of emotional intelligence. As the older norms of governance don’t hold good, trust and employee engagement needs to be handled with a lot more care and love. Employee onboarding must be done a lot more differently, and psychological safety should be a top priority. Leadership is not only about getting results but also about creating a safe, conducive environment for employees to grow, provide feedback, and talk openly about issues impacting their well begin. Leadership in this era requires a different level of finesse, EQ, and ability to lean in, at all levels. Employee connect is also a focus area as folks are working remotely, and we’re only able to connect virtually, so the connection is more important than what was prevalent in the past. Leadership is all about leading with humility and learning to embrace the new era of managing employees remotely and still getting the work done. It is all about the balance between your personal and professional lives, and leaders need to lead to show the path to that fine balance. Can you tell a bit about your business model, market and competition? We have created a one-of-a-kind platform that allows us to grow capabilities and meet the needs of numerous ecosystem partners around the world. So, whether the needs are highly controlled or unregulated, we can create for them. We deal directly with customers as well as partners through whom we go to market. We already support 3000 customers worldwide, and our goal is to serve not only huge corporations but also smaller organizations that lack the capacity of larger organizations. Our goal is to simplify and economically democratize access to SSE solutions. Skyhigh Security can also integrate data loss security from cloud to endpoint platforms, so we partner with hyperscalers while also being their significant clients, as we use some of those cloud providers to support our own products. As customers migrate to the cloud, the ability to
SKYHIGH SECURITY // Q&A
A B H AY
S O L A P U R K A R
CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER, SKYHIGH SECURITY
“Skyhigh Security is a new company; we have strong technical roots. We have a wide range of technology that is over a decade
old, and we have been a leader in this cloud journey since before the cloud market ever existed.”
see where their data is and how to protect it leads to a plethora of value-added services on top of the platform. We have already started engaging with channel partners to have them begin to put services on top of our platform, which will all be formalized over the next quarter. What level of technical support is included in your standard SLA? Our overarching goal is to provide best-in-class support services to our esteemed customers and ecosystem partners, enabling them to maximize their investment in the Skyhigh Security product portfolio. We have designed our support plans to help customers take maximum advantage of our services. At a broad level, we have three care plans: Skyhigh Premium Care Plan, Skyhigh Enterprise Care Plan, and Skyhigh Basic care plan. All products come with the Skyhigh Basic Care Plan, which includes basic deployment, education services, and standard support.
Below the SLA details by Care Plans:
Any niche plans/ambitions in India to become the top player in the
security segment? In February this year, Gartner has recognised Skyhigh Security as the leader in the inaugural Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge (SSE). We intend to concentrate on that market and improve our expertise in securing cloud workloads. Then we examine our target industries in two ways. There are industries that have a lot of compliance and rules related to their data, and then there are those that don’t. We service a lot of verticals that are extremely regulated, and compliance focused since we focus on data and were one of the first firms to do so, and because we speak their language around data, we can give them the visibility and protection they need in their highly regulated settings. That is why we operate extensively in the financial services, healthcare, and government sectors. Aside from those sectors, there are others that seek to protect their data but may not employ the language of compliance and regulatory framework that we find in the previously stated verticals. As a result, transitioning from heavily regulated businesses to non-regulated industries is easier than the other way around. We also collaborate with and seek to develop our customer base in large, global IT and manufacturing firms. These are the segments that we will concentrate on in India as well because they have a strong presence there. What would be the CISOs takeaway from Skyhigh Security? Indian businesses face the same issues as businesses elsewhere. They are becoming more focused on data and on sharing that data through collaboration among staff, partners, and customers. And they’re doing it mostly in a hybrid work environment, which means that while data is now everywhere, so are employees, customers, and partners. This presents CISOs with a unique issue because they want open flow of data so that everyone may collaborate and work successfully. They still want to be able to protect sensitive data, so when people and data are everywhere, the difficulty becomes managing it all in a secure manner. What remains true is that most breaches are caused by someone connecting to the network and gaining access to the data, rather than by breaking into these systems, and thus protecting the data through the employees’ eyes is vital. CISOs may secure their sensitive data to a degree by adopting a zero-trust posture, having strong email protection capabilities, as well as web access capabilities, and, of course, robust monitoring and visibility on how individuals are utilising SaaS assets.
MAY 2022
ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 37
GUEST COLUMN // DE-CIX
DE-CIX
4 REASONS WHY REGIONAL INTERNET EXCHANGES WILL LEAD TO ECONOMIC GROWTH With the digital economy growing faster, organization and individuals need experience from their service providers. Internet Exchange plays a vital role when it comes to digital contents. Ivo Ivanov, CEO, DE-CIX International elaborated on 4 points how IX can enhance the business growth.
IVO IVANOV
CEO, DE-CIX INTERNATIONAL
BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM
“A regional Internet Exchange is not only a defining competitive advantage for the city in question, but also a major business opportunity for the infrastructure players housing it.”
In today’s digital business world, especially when it comes to business processes, interconnection requirements are increasing in parallel with the growth in digital and cloud-based services. According to a study conducted by the OECD, the global Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for stable, fast, and efficient Internet for millions of employees and employers who already take advantage of the option of working from home and 38 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD
MAY 2022
are more likely to do so in the future. These employees depend on video calls, stable VPN connections, and fast access to work-related material. Because of the importance of digital applications to businesses and people, every millisecond counts. This is where latency, the time it takes for data to travel to its destination for processing and back again, plays a major role. High latency causes the lag we experience, for example, when we encounter performance problems on video conferencing software. All digital applications used in offices, the manufacturing sector, and all other industries today are extremely latency sensitive, as they need to deliver high performance without delays to guarantee a better digital experience. Big cities, with their large populations and strong economies, tend to lead the way in offering good quality connectivity. To ensure that regional connectivity is as good that available in major hubs, data needs to travel efficiently and avoid long distances. An expansion of local interconnection is therefore necessary to meet the demands of businesses and people in regional locations. Regions outside of the major metropolitan hubs need to invest in local digital infrastructure, such as expanding high-speed broadband networks and establishing Internet Exchanges, to maximize the potential for success, achieve low-latency connectivity, and ultimately better serve their citizens. Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX International, has identified four benefits of interconnection infrastructure in the form of regional Internet Exchanges (IXs), contributing to a positive development of regional digital economies. Local Interconnection improves the connectivity and performance of digital applications In our digital age, most compa-
nies need high-performance and secure interconnection to do business. Establishing a regional Internet Exchange will not only achieve that, but in addition offer tremendous growth opportunities for cities and their economies. Local IXs reduce latency between connected enterprises and enhance the speed of connectivity because data is not forced to travel further to be exchanged in larger digital hubs. Local interconnection also increases resilience, and leads to a more stable network. This provides better performance overall for applications such as cloud computing, VoIP connections, video conferencing and online collaboration. The applications on which our digital future will be based will require extremely low latency. Smart IoT and critical applications that require real-time responses, such as autonomous driving, require latencies in the 1-3 millisecond range and will therefore need to be performed within a range of 50-80 km from the user. This means that connectivity between the data centers where this data is processed and stored needs the shortest path to where the data is consumed. In turn, this allows companies in the region to interconnect with each other at the lowest possible latency. In order to max out and future-proof the growth potential of economic areas and second/third-tier cities away from major metropolitan hubs, in addition to good broadband infrastructure, data centers are needed that act as the core of regional networking. These data centers can provide access to a distributed Internet Exchange or interconnection platform, which offers various interconnection services for Internet service providers (ISPs) and enterprise networks.
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